It took me some time (install a pristine VL on a test partition, andapply one by one my personalizations till the symptom appears), butI found what was wrong: in /etc/profile.d there are two files "lang.sh"and "lang.csh" that I had modified to internationalize VL (changingloacales, language, etc...). Apparently, changing "lang.csh" did notcause problems, but modifying "lang.sh" caused VASM to malfunction.

I re-installed the initial files, and everything runs smooth now... withconsole in english.